Corsair Force GT 240GB & Crucial M4 SSD Update

Article Index:

Test Setup, IOMeter 1.1 RC and SANDRA

Our Test Methodologies:Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased and left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance for the average end user. That said, we do think IOMeter is a gauge for relative available throughput with a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you really can't with most other benchmark tools available currently.

The Samsung SSD 830 Series was the best overall performer in our IOMeter tests, but the Corsair Force GT put up the best scores of the SandForce-based drives. Surprisingly, the v009 firmware update of the M4 actually hurt its performance here, however.

SiSoft SANDRA 2011

Synthetic HDD Benchmarking

Next we ran SiSoft SANDRA, the the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. Here, we used the Physical Disk test suite and provided the results from our comparison SSDs. The benchmarks were run without formatting and read and write performance metrics are detailed below.

According to the SiSoft SANDRA Physical Disk benchmark, the Corsair Force GT 240GB drive rules the roost in terms of both reads and writes. And the Crucial firmware update had a huge impact on performance, taking the M4 up a few notches and allowing it to better compete with the SandForce-based drives in read throughput.